the cats with catheads

the person addressing me is hysterical. his name is allax and i have known him for the better part of the year. i would say intimately. i have let a stray cat into the house. he is trying to explain something to me, but i am having trouble understanding. he does not seem to be himself. he says, this isn’t how it is supposed to be. cats aren’t supposed to have heads like that. that cat has the head of a cat but cats can’t have cat heads. this is impossible. i ask for clarification but he can’t seem to articulate what is wrong, just that something is inside out and upside down in the world. at first it think that perhaps this is some form of the capgras delusion, a rare syndrome that leads an individual to believe that objects or people are impostors because they don’t have the proper emotional resonance. allax tells me that he thinks that either some evil mastermind is corrupting the world somehow or that he is slipping between spaces.

i speak with allax for several hours and reach the conclusion that something has happened to him, but i don’t believe that it is supernatural. he reluctantly agrees to be tested by one of the worlds leading neuroscientists. I leave allax in the care of others. i don’t have the courage to face him. i am sure that by now he has been committed. lately, i have found myself in a curios epistemological position, or rather disposition. i find myself unsure of things. have dogs always barked? have trees always had electroluminescent properties? it seems as if there was a time when things were slightly different from before, more normal. either the world is changing and i am one of the only two people on earth to have noticed, or this isn’t my earth at all. i suppose there is always another explanation, but i dare not admit that possibility. to question my sanity would be to take away the only foundation i have left. i do not think that i can survive alone, isolated like this. i must find allax. perhaps together we can unravel these tangled eyebrows. i see a pear tree growing up from a crack in the sidewalk, the fruit tastes salty. Finally, something familiar.

some of you might be saying, oh that’s just the capgras delusion combined with synesthesia. well, i wouldn’t be so sure. it is surely a stranger universe out there than it is as it exists inside the mind.

on cognition

Somewhere out there are people who perceive the world far differently than we do. There are people who can see gravity. There are people who do not perceive any separation between their bodies and the world around them. There are even those who here the voice of “God” in their heads as clearly as I can here myself typing right now. From synesthesia to transcendence, there is no limit to what how a mind might make sense of this strange world we are thrown into.